Download Android 5.0 Keyboard APK

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The Android 5.0 Lollipop update bought a whole lot of new things on table with the new Material design and developer APIs that the world of Android is never going to be the same again. What amazed us the most is the new device setup screens in Android 5.0, we have covered almost all of the screens in device setup in our post on Nexus 5 running Android 5.0, if you’re interested. As for the other things, the Android 5.0 final preview also includes a lot of new apps and one among those is the new Google Keyboard v4.0.

The Android 5.0 keybaord isn’t new and we’ve used it in the Android L developer preview, but until now the keyboard was only available in dark material theme while Google teased us with the light theme at Google I/O andseveral Play store screenshots. But thanks to the Android 5.0 final preview, we now have the Android 5.0 Keyboard with both light and dark theme.

The Android 5.0 keyboard now shows slightly bigger key pops, which feels much better than the slim ones we saw in the keyboard from Android L developer preview release.

You can install the Android 5.0 keyboard APK on your Android device running KitKat or Jellybean, but not by the usual means of installing an APK file. With Android 5.0, the APKs don’t pack the .so files so you have to install them separately which also means you’ll need a rooted device to install the Android 5.0 Keyboard on your device.

Using a file explorer app, go to /system/lib directory on your phone and rename the libjni_latinimegoogle.so file to libjni_latinimegoogle.so.bak└ This is to backup you current .so file before we replace it with the new one in next step.

Copy & Paste the new libjni_latinimegoogle.so that you downloaded above to the /system/lib directory on your phone.

Try opening the keyboard now, it should work. If it doesn’t, also try rebooting the device.